Get a Sugar Rush with Candy Crush Saga

When popular Facebook games hit the App Store, it’s always fun to see what their iOS counterparts are like. Candy Crush Saga has long been a Facebook favorite, but just recently made its debut for the iPhone and iPad. Find out what made Candy Crush Saga quickly reach the top of the App Store charts right after the break.

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A Kid in the Candy Store

Walk into Candy Crush Saga and what do you see? You guessed it — a whole lot of candy. Gameplay is the exact same as its Facebook counterpart, and is played like Bejeweled, but with colorful candies in the place of jewels. To play, you switch candies in order to create strings of three or more candies. By doing so, the candies subsequently disappear, and may cause other candies to form these strings and disappear as well.

Arrange candies into strings in order to clear them from the board.

By creating strings of four or five like candies, you will spawn a special, more powerful candy. If you arrange a “T” sequence, you will also be rewarded with a special candy. These special candies can help speed progress though the game by taking out more candies than the standard strings would.

If you combine two special candies together, you get a kind of super-candy which can do massive damage.

You beat levels by reaching certain goals. You are unable to progress to new levels until you have beaten whichever level you are already on; however, you may go back and replay older levels. The game also functions on a life system, and you are only allowed to lose five lives. After losing all five, you must wait some time to play again or pay a small price.

The game is also able to be connected to Facebook. This allows you to help out your friends in their own games and are able to receive help in return.

So Many Choices

One of the great things about Candy Crush Saga is that it comes packed with over 150 levels in its campaign, which guarantees hours of playtime. As if this extensive campaign was not enough, each level has replay value as you will most likely not reach the level target on the first try, and in order to truly beat the game you will need to have that prized third star on every level.

New obstacles and objectives put necessary twists in the game.

Sure, 150 levels of the same-old gameplay would get boring after a point, but the developers did a really good job at keeping the game fresh by throwing in special levels every now and then. There is a handful of different gameplay types — each are played the same at their core — that have different goals to keep the game interesting.

Sugar Rush!

To describe Candy Crush Saga in one word, it’d be addicting. Each time you play — even if you’re replaying the same level — the levels will be spawned completely differently than the rest. Special levels are thrown in at the perfect times throughout the campaign, which keeps gameplay from getting stale. It’s the kind of game that you’ll find yourself playing for hours on end.

You get an extra bonus if you end the level with extra moves!

Candy Crush Saga is by far one of the most difficult games on the App Store. Especially as you progress throughout the game, the margin between passing and failing grows increasingly slim. More often than not, I have found myself running out of lives trying to beat a level or striving to earn that third star. This makes the game challenging and gives you something to work for.

Highway Robbery?

Candy Crush does come packed with tons of in-app purchases that can help you throughout the game. These in-app purchases can buy you extra lives so you don’t have to wait half an hour to earn one back; extra moves; and objects/power-ups that can help you beat those really tough levels.

While useful, some power-ups just cost a ridiculous amount of money.

Here’s the catch: some of these helpful purchases can cost you up to $ 40 a pop. It’s a business tactic reminiscent of robber barons in the sense that you come to a point where there seems as if there is no choice but to spend money on these extra lives or power-ups. When you do resort to this, your pockets will be emptied quickly.

Cut the waiting time and avoid paying for lives by connecting your game to Facebook. Doing so allows your friends to send you lives when you need them.

Nevertheless, there shouldn’t be a need to purchase said power-ups, but the fact that there are in-app purchases going for such a ludicrous amount of money can not be condoned.

The Verdict

All in all, Candy Crush Saga is an amazing game. Controls are simple enough that you should be able to pick up the game and play without hesitation. Gameplay is challenging. It’s addictiveness makes the game like an amazing novel — the type of thing you’ll never want to put down. And like that novel, the game never seems to grow stale. As an added bonus, there is a ton of replay value as a result of the randomly spawned levels.

However, this game can’t get a perfect score for a couple of reasons. For one, your play time will become limited, especially upon reaching the harder levels, as you run out of lives and must wait for the game to regenerate new ones. Additionally, all of the power-ups (and extra lives, for that matter) are sold for exorbitant amounts of money.

Granted, the game is available for free and definitely makes for a fun puzzle game experience. That being said, Candy Crush Saga is a game everyone should try out.

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Get a Sugar Rush with Candy Crush Saga, 8.0 out of 10 based on 1 rating